The Kinsey Controversy

Note: This article contains explicit sexual
references that may be offensive to some readers but are
necessary to its discussion of this film.

SDG

The life and work of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, the
Indiana University entomologist turned pioneering sexologist, has
provoked accounts and interpretations as divergent, and as
bitterly contested, as John Kerry’s Vietnam service in the last
election. And, while it’s true that Kinsey’s work warrants such
scrutiny, it’s also true that this only makes the task of weeding
through the arguments more daunting.

To some, Kinsey was a fearless academic pioneer who defied
conventional social taboos and helped end an era of rampant
ignorance, misinformation, and fear about sex. To others, he was
a depraved propagandist in a bowtie who draped a cloak of
academic respectability over lies, sin, and perversion. Some
claim that he and his researchers may even have carried out
sexual experimentation upon children; others insist that Kinsey’s
data was gathered solely from interviews.

There seems to be no distinguishing the man from his cause; as
with Kerry’s war record, opinion on Kinsey seems to divide
strictly along party lines, though the lines are moral, not
political. Those with permissive views of homosexuality,
masturbation and premarital sex uniformly accord Kinsey respect
and recognition; those who maintain traditional Judeo-Christian
sexual morality regard him as an unprincipled snake in the grass.
There are other figures who can elicit credit or censure across
party lines, but opinion about Kinsey — not just of his
conclusions or the effects of his work, but of his methods and
motives — comes depressingly close to a litmus test of moral
opinion.

The human propensity to construe data in a way congenial to
our individual prejudices can be an almost inexorable force. The
progression from "It would be very handy if this were true" to
"It ought to be true" to "It probably is true" can be a
perilously slippery slope. Indeed, this is precisely the charge
that Kinsey’s critics make against his work — that he recklessly
distorted the facts to suit his own libertine agenda, which aimed
at the normalization of all forms of sexual behavior, including
adult-child and human-animal sexual interactions.

Of course, the same human weakness for convenient propaganda
might equally be faulted for the long-standing credence given to
other erroneous notions about sex by society prior to Kinsey. For
example, the 19th-century canards about masturbation causing a
host of conditions ranging from blindness and insanity to hairy
palms and green faces were doubtless propagated for moralistic
reasons, by individuals who found the threat of such dire
consequences congenial to their moral outlook. It’s easy to pass
on an idea when you feel it might do some good, and can’t see in
any case that it could possibly do any harm.

Except that such myths do cause harm — in part because,
being untrue, they pose a convenient target for opponents looking
to debunk what others tried to defend with shoddy weapons. From a
traditional moral perspective, keeping ourselves in the dark
about sex only made it harder to know what we were looking at
when people like Kinsey began selectively shining lights around
in various corners. Whatever harm Kinsey did, whatever blame he
bears for his legacy — and I think it is enormous on both counts — it was men more like Kinsey’s sternly religious father who set
the stage for his work.

As an entomologist, Kinsey made a name for himself studying
individual variations among gall wasps by amassing a huge
collection of specimens. When he turned his attention to sex
research, Kinsey followed an ostensibly similar approach,
sampling volunteers and amassing a vast collection of "sexual
histories," analysis of which he and his colleagues published in
the controversial, surprise best-selling studies, Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in
the Human Female (1953).

It is widely recognized that Kinsey’s methods, though
pioneering, were flawed in many respects. For various reasons,
his survey samples were substantially skewed toward
non-representative populations, including convicted criminals and
homosexuals. Ostensibly to encourage candid responses, Kinsey
trained his researchers always to ask leading questions that
assumed that the subject had engaged in the behavior in question
(e.g., "How often do you masturbate?"; "When did you first have
extramarital sex?"), and to maintain a neutral, nonjudgmental
manner at all times.

Kinsey’s policy of nonjudgmentalism was, however, more than
mere methodological neutrality. He didn’t just prescind from moral
questions as a scientist studying human behavior — he seems to
have been adamantly opposed to negative moral judgments about
virtually all forms of sexual behavior, and his published studies
explicitly reflect this bias.

For example, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male he
and his colleagues debunked taboos against bestiality, ridiculing
"those who believe, as children do, that conformance should be
universal, any departure from the rule becomes an immorality"
which only "seems particularly gross to an individual who is
unaware of the frequency with which exceptions to the supposed
rule actually occur," and expressing surprise at "the degree of
abhorrence with which intercourse between the human and animals
of other species is viewed by most persons who have not had such
experience" (pp. 667-68).

Pedophilia Kinsey likewise whitewashed, arguing in Sexual
Behavior in the Human Female that there seems to be no
reason, apart from "cultural conditioning," that a child should
be "disturbed at having its genitalia touched, or disturbed at
seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at even more
specific sexual contacts," and going on to implicate "the current
hysteria over sex offenders" as the real danger to children (p.
121).

Even rape Kinsey lightly regarded as "easily forgotten"; he
has been quoted as quipping that "the difference between rape and
a good time depends on whether the girl’s parents were awake when
she finally came home."

Was this amoral vision of human sexuality merely the skeptical
rationalism of an unsentimental scientist? On the contrary, it
seems to have been the deeply personal credo of an individual
with severely disordered passions. From his secretive childhood
to his exhibitionist adulthood when he and his colleagues engaged
in collective practical "research" on film, Kinsey practiced
extremely bizarre forms of masturbation including inserting
foreign objects (e.g., toothbrushes, bristle end first) down his
urethra and similar masochistic exercises. Public nudity,
wife-swapping, homosexual promiscuity, and group sex were all
part of the culture of Kinsey’s inner circle.

Kinsey’s pornographic auto-documentaries apparently remain
under lock and key at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute,
which publicly promotes a much more conventional portrait at its
founder on its low-key website. "We don’t know everything about
the intimacies of Alfred Kinsey’s life (we leave that to the
biographers)…" reads a typically terse comment on the
Kinsey website, speaking to the controversy surrounding Bill
Condon’s film, Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson.

As this comment tacitly suggests, Condon’s film at least
scratches the surface of its protagonist’s emphatically checkered
life. Like other recent biopics of influential but troubled men
such as Ray and A Beautiful Mind, Kinsey is
willing to allow its subject to be a flawed human being — up to a
point.

So, for example, Kinsey is stung when accused in the wake of
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female of "insectizing"
American womanhood — yet the film has already shown Kinsey
himself, first forming the idea for his study of sexual behavior,
describing human beings as "larger, slightly more complicated
gall wasps." Kinsey comes across with insect-like inhumanity
himself in a scene in which he tries to explain to his anguished
wife, Clara (Laura Linney), the scientific validity of his recent
homosexual fling; when Clara angrily tells him, "Stop using
science to justify what you’ve done," our sympathies are clearly
meant to be with her, not him. Later, when Clara has a revenge
fling with the same man, Kinsey’s principles won’t allow him to
think "jealousy," but he’s plainly inarticulately
uncomfortable.

Here and elsewhere, Condon nods toward the sorts of
conventional sexual attitudes that were antithetical to Kinsey’s
worldview. Yet in general it does so in a way that softens the
characters rather than ambiguating them. For example, Kinsey’s
jealousy at his wife’s brief fling, though hypocritical, makes
him seem more human and naive than the real Kinsey, who actually
demanded that Clara copulate with other men on film.

In one key scene, Kinsey sits down to take the sexual history
of a sexual monster named Kenneth Braun (William Sadler), whose
detailed accounts of his own sexual encounters with an alleged
600 boys, 200 girls, countless adults of both sexes, and animals
of various species were an important source of data for Kinsey,
especially regarding the alleged sexual responses of
preadolescent children.

As Braun recounts his sexual history, a Kinsey colleague
(Chris O’Donnell) abruptly reaches some threshold of tolerance
and storms out of the room. Kinsey, adhering to his policy of
nonjudgmentalism, encourages Braun to continue.

"I never said that," counters Kinsey with controlled feeling.
"No one should ever be forced to do anything against their will.
No one should ever be hurt."

This isn’t meant as a purely theoretical comment. We’re
supposed to gather that Kinsey believes Braun has in fact hurt
people — presumably, the hundreds of children he has abused. In
light of Kinsey’s actual, published views of adult-child sex,
though, this would seem to be sheer dishonesty.

In general, the film supports the picture of Kinsey as a
bookish, ivory-tower academic who simply happened to study an
explosive area of human behavior with an open mind. Clara tells
him at one point that he’s a bit too "churchy" for her, and Braun
calls him a "square." He collects pornography, but for purely
academic reasons. Even in his bedroom scene with another man
comes across like a naive schoolboy awed by the star
quarterback.

Condon makes no secret, though, of Kinsey’s social agenda — in
fact he flaunts it. At one point, trying to secure funding,
Kinsey says modestly, "I’m just a taxonomist, a measurer; I’m
happy to leave the social policies to others" — but he says it
with a literal wink. By the final act, he’s boldly proclaiming
that "Sexual morality needs to be reformed."

One of the film’s most important lines comes in the following
rationale by Kinsey of his work: "One of the aims of science is
to simplify. The only way to study sex with any scientific
accuracy is to strip away everything but the physiological." As a
methodological approach to what can and can’t be measured in
human behavior, this might be a defensible assessment. But Kinsey
and his colleagues didn’t just try to "strip away everything but
the physiological" analytically, but actually. They
tried to live as if sex were nothing but physiological,
and their published arguments assume the same point of view.

The sheer banality of this sad debauchery is nowhere more
glaring than at a Kinsey party where one of the professor’s inner
circle cavalierly excuses himself and a lover from the party with
a cheerfully graphic remark about his state of arousal. So this
is what Kinsey’s liberation means, besides degradation and
perversity: the freedom to lack class. How utterly wearying.

Toward the end of the film is a much-noted scene in which a
happy lesbian (Lynn Redgrave) in a committed relationship
pronounces the film’s final benediction on Kinsey, assuring him
what a better place the world has become thanks to him. Just
prior to that, though, is another scene that caught my attention,
in which Kinsey, reflecting on past failures, breaks down and
murmurs, "I couldn’t help them…" The scene recalls,
perhaps, a naggingly similar scene of emotional breakdown and
self-recrimination at the end of another biopic starring Liam
Neeson.

I’d like to think that the echo of Schindler’s List is
inadvertent (I don’t want to believe bad things about Condon just
because it suits my outlook). If not, it would be a tasteless
touch in a film that may safely count tastelessness among the
least of its offenses.